Sunday Levity: Two kidnappings that weren’t

Are the subcontinent’s villains losing their edge?

When armed men took away Mayar Noori, the administrator of Pasni in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, both he and his uncle, a provincial minister, thought that he had been kidnapped by rivals. But the alarm proved to be unfounded after it appeared that the abductors were, well, members of Pakistan’s anti-narcotics force who had taken him into custody.

But despite a court petition by a self-proclaimed well-wisher, Subrata Roy Sahara, chairman and the idiosyncratically titled ‘managing worker’ of the $11 billion Sahara conglomerate, was not even kidnapped. From his hiding place, the managing worker wrote a letter to his lawyer that was produced in court: